«
»

Hackweek Over

I must say I’m happy about what I picked for this year’s Hackweek. My back and neck have not enjoyed the hackweek, but all the other body parts did :) While I am far from finished, I am surprised how much can be done on a font in a week (around 60 hours I would reckon) if I don’t need to worry about anything else.

The glyph coverage is better than what I planned. The typeface is stronger to what I sketched out and I hate there is no programmatic way to get smaller widths or alter x-height. Nevertheless I think the project was a success.

#

People keep asking what tools I use – Fontforge is the master tool for all this, it’s really packed with features. But I wouldn’t be able to draw a thing in it (even though it does have a large palette of tools), so all the glyphs have been constructed in Inkscape. Big thanks to George Williams not only for the amazing tool, but also for great documentation.

I’ve realized over the week just how much work needs to be done to create a full font family. I always considered the prices to be quite high, but this stuff is years of experience and endless tweaking. I know I’ll never try anything bigger than a display face/headliner in this life. That said, I think now is the perfect time to ask you to come forward and join the fun. Lots of international glyphs I have no idea about need to be done, the spacing fixed, etc. Check out the font from opensuse-art SVN and play with it, improve it. Discussions should take place on the opensuse-art mailing list. Thank you.

Also a big thanks to Novell for a great opportunity to Free openSUSE and Linux in general one step further.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 29th, 2008 at 6:03 pm and is filed under Design, hackweek, Inkscape, openSUSE, Work. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

14 Responses to “Hackweek Over”

  1. Livio Says:
    August 29th, 2008 at 6:29 pm

    Try with Polish chars: Ä™??Ä…?›?‚????ć?„Ä??“Ä„?š???»??Ć?? and some French like ?§?©?« ;) .

  2. Livio Says:
    August 29th, 2008 at 6:30 pm

    What the …? Why Polish and French chars became question marks :s ?

    D’oh.

    Also, show us how “openSUSE” looks in this font ;) .

  3. jimmac Says:
    August 29th, 2008 at 6:48 pm

    @Livio: it’s time for our resident Pole to fill in the Polish blanks :)

  4. triton Says:
    August 29th, 2008 at 6:59 pm

    the numbers suck… sorry! :D

  5. Linuxart » Blog Archive » Hack Week wrap-up! Says:
    August 29th, 2008 at 7:55 pm

    [...] Jakub had a great idea; initially I wanted to help out, but I basically wound up making my own SUSE derivative font. Most of it was done on Monday. I spent today (Friday) tidying i up and redoing a lot of the glyphs, as well as quickly adjusting the space between letters (kerning). [...]

  6. Livio Says:
    August 29th, 2008 at 8:21 pm

    Erm, you mean, I should do this :> ?

  7. Denis Says:
    August 31st, 2008 at 12:13 pm

    Nice work.

    The middle bar of the 8 looks a bit thin. It’s thinner than the middle bar of the B.

    The Z and z look a bit slanted, as if they were in italic. So does the 2.

    The bottom of the lowercase l is maybe too subtle.

    I find it hard to make the difference between breve and caron. Maybe breve should be rounder.

    Ohorn/ohorn and Uhorn/uhorn should have the horns connected to the base character.

    U+01d3 has the caron off place.

    There’s no data about the license besides the license URL in the file. Shouldn’t the OFL files be in the directory?

  8. jimmac Says:
    August 31st, 2008 at 8:48 pm

    Hey Denis, awesome comments! Thanks, will address. As for the license, it should be embedded in the font, and it’s also separately in the folder. Or do you mean something else?

  9. Denis Says:
    August 31st, 2008 at 10:59 pm

    Oh, right, the COPYING_OFL is at the right place. I guess I was absent minded :-)
    I just got used to OFLed fonts having FONTLOG, FAQ and whatnot in the directory.

  10. jEsuSdA 8) Says:
    November 28th, 2008 at 9:35 am

    Link does not work :(

  11. jimmac Says:
    November 28th, 2008 at 4:16 pm

    jEsuSdA, as far as I can tell the links are fine. Which one doesn’t work for you?

  12. Stopped Clock Blog Says:
    November 12th, 2009 at 1:00 pm

    [...] Sonar icon theme from Factory. It’s also the first time we’re using the openSUSE font, 5th Leg, for window titles. 5th Leg is the result of openSUSE’s Hackweek and have to express my [...]

  13. Jakub Steiner: openSUSE 11.2 — the art of GNOME | Full-Linux.com Says:
    November 14th, 2009 at 9:22 am

    [...] the Sonar icon theme from Factory. It’s also the first time we’re using the openSUSE font, 5th Leg, for window titles. 5th Leg is the result of openSUSE’s Hackweek and have to express my gratitude [...]

  14. jEsuSdA 8) (jesusda) 's status on Thursday, 19-Nov-09 21:24:16 UTC - Identi.ca Says:
    November 19th, 2009 at 11:39 pm

    [...] http://jimmac.musichall.cz/log/?p=441 a few seconds ago from web [...]

Leave a Reply